Evaluating the Robustness of Adverse Drug Event Classification Models Using Templates
Dorothea MacPhail
David Harbecke
Lisa Raithel
Sebastian Möller
An adverse drug effect (ADE) is any harmful event resulting from medical drug treatment. Despite their importance, ADEs are often under-reported in official channels. Some research has therefore turned to detecting discussions of ADEs in social media. Impressive results have been achieved in various attempts to detect ADEs. In a high-stakes domain such as medicine, however, an in-depth evaluation of a model’s abilities is crucial. We address the issue of thorough performance evaluation in English-language ADE detection with handcrafted templates for four capabilities: Temporal order, negation, sentiment, and beneficial effect. We find that models with similar performance on held-out test sets have varying results on these capabilities
